Dear All,
Its one of the finest days of my life. I am highly relieved and my last few weeeks effort paid off more than expected. Once again i crossed the 90's. Yeah, i scored 94% in SCWCD.
Though the result is mine, but the efforts were not along mine. I must thank:
a.) All the people who took part actively/inactively in the following forums :
www.javaranch.com www.jchq.net These conversations and discussions really helped specially because of the newness of this exam. Thanks guys/gals including those at jchq (specially marcus), it was indeed a great help from all of you. Thanks for answering my queries which kept me worryfree at many stages.
This forum of ours has really grown up in a short time. Its a great effort from its creators and all of us. Lest make this even BIGGER.
b.) Then i would like to thank those whizkids
at
www.whizlabs.com/jwhiz . SCWCD@Whiz IS GREAT. No doubt about the reviews by people like tony alicea and others. As rajat told in his
thread http://www.javaranch.com/ubb/Forum18/HTML/000123.html, i am also impressed with the closeness of the questions of scwcdwhiz with the actual exam.
I waslucky to get the latest update of scwcdwhiz ( 2 days before my exam) with their Unique Quiz. As they wrote at their site in the mail to me, it really had a significant contribution to my score, atleast 10%. An innovative feature which is higly useful for exams like this specially scwcd as it needs you to cram many things. I think its because of this quiz only that i could score 100% in DD questions and many short answer/fill in the blank questions.
c.) I also used sun practice tests but im almost disappointed. Maybe sun intentially kept it apart from the actual exam. It's not ethical for the teacher to leak the question paper.. similar analogy. But still it had a contribution.
d.) I must thank ken bcoz of his great notes. I am sure with time, it will evolve furhter and will be complete... and more helpful to people who are yet to wear the scwcd crown. Thanks ken. Keep it up!!!
e.) My sincere thanks goes to Carl for his great efforts in creating the links page and mock exam. Thanks carl and his team. Keep it up!!! I hope carl will read this
Another thing which i believe help others (which helped me as well) is to share my background and amount of effort i put in.
Overall i've around 2.5 years of s/w experince out of which 1.5 year is in
java out of which 9 months has been in JSP/Servlets/JavaBeans/EJB's. My whole practice for this exam was on Weblogic 5.1 server. But i think any of the webserver's be it
J2EE server,
tomcat, weblogic, websphere will help as they follow the specs.
I actually studied for around 1.5 months with around 2-3 hours a day. Most of my time was spent in going through Specs which i believe is THE BEST SOURCE for this exam. I followed Core
Servlets and
JSP and JSP (o'reilly). But these books doesn't cover everything. For e.g. for design
patterns, nothing can match the tutorial at sun's site. Before i forget, my personal advice is to use the JSP syntax guide about which not everyone is yet awared of. This is really handy and helps at every stage. The link for this is :
http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/pdf/card11.pdf ( you will need acrobat reader)
Now coming to the exam:
As shared by rajat and others, its comparatively simpler than
SCJP. The paper doesn't involve many code based questions like scjp and you need not slog through ten's if not hunderd's of mock exams like scjp. But there is one catch, for scjp a person with sound knowledge and experience in java can score very high as the current pattern doesn't involve knowing the methods/interfaces/syntax's of such a wide jdk1.2 api. Here its different, you need to cram many things like DD's hierarchy, you need to browse through the specs to actually learn which method belongs to which class/interface and what's the relationship b/w different DD elements and their correct names.
Similar to scjp, you will have enough time to go through each and every question. Not many questions are code based but there are many short answer questions. Thus you must knowthe name of the method/class/interface/DD element/return type etc. The proportion of the questions is almost similar to the one posted by rajat.
Although i got one question from one of the design patterns (im not able to recall) which is not in the prescribed list of 4 patterns, but it was intutive enough to guess. So you people need not worry much. Infact this was one of the point where i was worried. Regarding filters, i didn't receive any question and im not still not sure whether anyone gets any question on it.
There were many questions asking you to check the syntax of jsp code, so please make sure you know the difference between an expression and a scriptlet and things like that. DON't MISS ANY DD ELEMENT as prescribed in the syllabus. Many question will be there. I believe knowing DTD (xml) terminogly helps you remeber the relationship (like element a must contain 1 or more occurences of b).
For me i believe i lost marks in listeners topic and web application structure. Please give enough time to listeners topic for two things :
a.) Various listener DD elements
b.) Various interfaces/classes and their methods. There were few fill in the blank question asking you write the interface name to which the given method belongs to.
To summarize all the resources which i found useful were:
I.) JSP and Servlet Specs (MOST IMP, you can't afford to miss them. Give enough time browsing and slogging through one page to another)
II.) Core Servlets and JSP and JSP (o'reilly) books ( didn't have time to try others, im sure other books will be equally good)
III.) SCWCD@Whiz Mock Tests and Quiz ( tells you the kind of questions u'll get and make you confident and Quiz - higly recommended for revising DD elements and methods/classes of API)
IV.) Kens Notes (Incomplete but really useful)
V.) Desing patterns tutorial at sun (in my knowledge the best source to prepare for this topic)
VI.) JSP syntax guide (people are yet not aware of this tiny but useful resource)
VII.) My project code
(Having real life and practical exposure helps to great extent)
VIII) taglib tutorial at jakarta :
http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/tutorial.html IX) Listeners tutorial :
http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2001/04/12/listeners.html I think my post has grown like a Titanic and before is gives boredom to any of my friend, i would like to close this before finally thanking all of you for your contribution.
I would be happy to help other of my fellow friends in this not so tough yet worthy journey to Web Component Developer Certification.
My heartly wishes to all of you
Rachel
SCJP2, SCWCD, more to follow
